This is the second post in a blog series that uncovers how the major social media platforms are personalized to their end users. Marketers need to be aware of social media personalization to ensure that their messages appear for their target audience.
Every Twitter users knows that to see someone’s tweets you need to follow them. But are you aware that there is also a layer of personalization that also comes into play about whether you will see a particular tweet?
From a marketer’s perspective, does this mean that many of your tweets are not being seen by your followers? POSSIBLY.
Here are some elements to keep in mind in relation to how people will see your tweets organically:
- Most tweets only last “or appear in the timeline” for 18 minutes after publishing. (Unless you are managing a celebrity twitter account, those will last longer).
- Someone has to be following your handle to see your tweet
- That someone has to have interacted with one of your tweets in the past
- The content of your tweet needs to be something that the algorithm determines would be of interest to them.
Curious as to how I figured this out? There is a great video and presentation online about Twitter and machine learning.
Overall, there are a variety of features of your own profile on Twitter that impacts what is shown to you via your personalized experience. Those include:
- Tweets from your connections, how strong they are
- Signals from the accounts you follow
- Who they follow
- Your language preference
- Location
- Gender
- Your interaction level on various tweets
Not convinced? Here’s a personal story to highlight how this manifests in real time:
I have a colleague who was watching the news of the Boston Marathon bombing with her partner. They were both heavy Twitter users, and both followed a particular AP reporter who was covering the bombing. Her partner saw the tweet when it was posted and she did not. Why? Because her partner had interacted with the AP reporter’s tweets previously, where my collegiate was just following the handle, but hadn’t interacted with any of the reporter’s tweets.
As marketers, what can we do to tackle this personalization?
This can seem very overwhelming if you previously thought that all of your followers saw all of your tweets. It’s pretty disheartening to know that even your engaged users won’t see tweets from your handle if your content is not algorithmically selelcted to be shown to them.
But let’s take a deep breath. Twitter can still be a powerful platform for your marketing messages, but here are the new tactics that you’ll need to deploy to ensure that your efforts are successful:
- Know who your followers are and ensure that your editorial calendar will resonate with them. Followerwonk through Moz tools is a great option to figure this out, or Social Bro.
- Measure the post timing that works best for your followers and follow that timing. This will vary by handle. There are a variety of tools that let you track this – Social Bro, Tweet When, and Tweriod.
- Post frequently and evenly throughout the day. Based on the 18 minute metric above, you need A LOT of tweets per day to be effective. In fact there is also an academic study out of Georgia Tech on how to grow Twitter followers which recommends tweeting 8 times per hour.
- Engage with your users and create content that will engage them. Considering engagement is one of the key elments of the algorithm, seek out your power Twitter followers and create moments where you can engage them. I personally think this is where a social CRM comes in so that you know who your social media followers are across all of your handles, and at Ketchum we use Buzzstream for this.
As marketers we can’t continue to try to do marketing by hand without using data collection and analysis tools to strengthen our outreach plans and to ensure that our messages will fit within the algorithmic parameters and will therefore be shown to our target audience.
This trend is not going away, if anything the algorithms and machine learning in place at these social media platforms are getting more sophisticated. To ensure that we are not just spinning our wheels creating content that isn’t being seen, we need to get more sophisticated in our marketing practices, and in our analysis of our social media followers.
Have you seen Twitter’s personalization in action?
I would love to hear your thoughts or observations below about how you’ve experienced personalization on Twitter, or tools/tactics you’ve used to more effectively target your Twitter content, publication, and distribution to ensure that your message is presented to your target audience.
And stay tuned for the next post in this series where I will look at how LinkedIn is personalized to you (and to your target audience).